Goo is the sixth full-length studio album by American alternative rock band Sonic Youth, released on June 26, 1990, by DGC Records.

Although it lacked significant radio airplay, its lead single "Kool Thing", a collaborative effort with Public Enemy's Chuck D, reached number seven on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart.

[7][8] By mid-1989, Sonic Youth's relationship with its British and American label head Paul Smith, who the band's legal counsel, Richard Grebal, termed "a trusted advisor but never a manager", was growing increasingly strained.

[9][10] The situation was compounded further when Smith took a bold negotiating stance with major record labels during the Daydream Nation tour and took long intervals to communicate information to the band.

[12] In November 1989, Sonic Youth, accompanied by producers Don Fleming and J Mascis, recorded demos of eight songs at the Waterworks, a studio run by Jim Waters in the meat-packing district of New York City.

Sonic Youth used the studio time to experiment with abstract techniques such as hanging microphones from the Sorcerer Sound's catwalk and isolating Shelley in a drum booth.

[16] After the basic tracks were completed, Sonic Youth moved to Greene St. Recording, Sansano's home base, to finalize the songs and begin the process of mixing Goo.

[20] Band biographer Stevie Chick described Gordon's lyrics as "coloured by a suffocating almost gothic sadness" and "melancholy perhaps similar to that which underscores the Carpenters own music".

[20] In her anthology book Here She Comes Now: Women in Music Who Have Changed Our Lives, Elissa Schnappel wrote that Gordon "transformed the experience into a sharp and witty social critique of gender, race and power that you could dance to.

Instead of his original Joan Crawford sketch, Sonic Youth chose another Pettibon design: an illustration of two sunglasses-wearing British mods, based on a photograph of Maureen Hindley and David Smith, two witnesses in the Moors murders trial.

He believed Goo was a "brilliant, extended essay in refined primitivism that deftly reconciles rock's structural conventions with the band's twin passions for violent tonal elasticity and garage-punk holocaust".

[37] Jonathan Gold of the Los Angeles Times hailed Sonic Youth as the "Rolling Stones of noise music" and found the band's distorted guitars, danceable rhythms and catchy choruses fit for radio airplay.

[27] Alec Foerge cited it as "radical—even defiant by 1990 major label standards"[23] while David Browne said the album's success was "an indication that an audience for this music was coalescing, albeit slowly".

[27] Daisy Jones of Dazed found the album powerfully relevant to American youth: "It sprung out of 1990, the year in which grunge had spread like an itch amongst a generation increasingly disillusioned with the mock-metal and stadium theatrics of artists like Guns N' Roses and Alice Cooper".

[39] Writing for Tidal, Jakob Matzen said that because Goo was Sonic Youth's most approachable album, it is a "crucial piece of the puzzle to understand how and why other alternative artists (like Nirvana) were able to bring the underground to the mainstream and challenge the dominant music industry hegemony".

[40] Music journalist Andrew Earles wrote that "What makes Goo an undeniable winner is Sonic Youth's increased focus on songcraft", going on to say the album contains some of the best material of the band's career.

[41] All music is composed by Sonic Youth (Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley)Credits are adapted from the liner notes of Goo.